The risk for death of mother as well as newborn varies dramatically between the developed and the developing countries. WHO estimates that over 98% of maternal and infant deaths occur in the developing countries. Over half of these deaths occur when deliveries take place in the home without health care personnel present. But also when deliveries take place in health care institutions, maternal and death rates are more than 10 times higher in developing countries.
One main reason for this is that there are too few birth attendants available and that many of these have not been adequately trained to handle obstetric or newborn emergency cases. The invention described herein aims at addressing this problem.
The causes for these deaths are in many cases related to conditions that could have been easily avoided or remedied. It has been experienced that the death rate can be substantially lowered if the midwife or other persons helping the mother and newborn is given some basic training in handling the most usual complications that can occur. It is also a great advantage if the simulator also can be used for building awareness and knowledge for a mother as preparation in advance of the birth.
In order to facilitate training many devices have been suggested that provides a more or less realistic situation to the medical personnel. Among these are the following: WO03041034, U.S. Pat. No. 5,472,345, U.S. Pat. No. 3,822,486, US2007105083, US2005014115, DE10202504, WO0201536, U.S. Pat. No. 3,826,019, U.S. Pat. No. 2,495,568, U.S. Pat. No. 3,797,130, U.S. Pat. No. 3,921,311, U.S. Pat. No. 5,104,328, US2006073456, US2004214150, WO2008042931, US2008138779, US2008138780.
The above devices are generally too complicated to be used under primitive conditions in a developing country, most of them even requiring electricity to work.
Newly developed training device is shown in US 20090298035. This device has the advantage of being simple and easy to use. It can be put on a person acting as the expecting mother like a pair of trousers. The “mother” then puts a foetus manikin into a doll-containing portion, i.e. a pocket, the trousers and pushes it out through a hole simulating the vagina.
Although, this device is very simple to use and appropriate for low resource settings, it does not sufficiently support training for basic and more advanced situations and interventions relevant during the three stages of birth. It is also not possible to simulate a number of usual complications after the delivery.